Josephine Balmer

Josephine Balmer (born 1959) is a British poet, translator of classics and literary critic.^[1][2] She sets the daily Word Watch and weekly Literary Quiz for The Times.^[2]

She was born in 1959 in Hampshire and now lives in East Sussex.^[3] She studied classics at University College, London and was awarded a PhD degree by publication by the University of East Anglia.^[3]

She was Chair of the British Translators' Association from 2002–2005, and reviews editor of the journal Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004–2009. She was a judge of poetry translation for the Stephen Spender Prize in 2006–2009 and 2015.^[4]

In 1989 her translation Sappho: Poems and Fragments was shortlisted for the inaugural US Lambda Literary Awards.^[5] In 2017 her collection The Paths of Survival was shortlisted for the London Hellenic Prize.^[6]

Works

• Sappho: Poems and Fragments (1984, 1988 & 1992) ^[7]
• Classical Women Poets (1996)^[8]
• Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate (2004)^[9][10]
• Chasing Catullus: Poems, Translations and Transgressions (2004) ^[11][10]
• The Word for Sorrow (2008)^[3][12][13]
• Piecing Together the Fragments: Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry (2013)^[14]
• The Paths of Survival (2017) ^[15][16]
• Letting Go: thirty mourning sonnets and two poems (2017)^[17][18]
• Sappho: Poems and Fragments New Expanded Edition (2018)^[7]
• Ghost Passage (2022)^[19]